The Fog of War, Part 1
by Connie Corcoran Wilson
Throughout
“The Fog of War,” the 2003 Oscar-winning documentary produced and
directed by Errol Morris, interview subject Robert McNamara, former
Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the
Viet Nam war, offers these eleven lessons which could serve us equally
well as a nation today:
1) Empathize with your enemy.
2) Rationality will not save us.
3) There’s something beyond one’s self.
4) Maximize efficiency.
5) Proportionality should be a lesson in war.
6) Get the data.
7) Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
8) Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning.
9) In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
10) Never say never.
11) You can’t change human nature.
While
sharing these lessons, learned during his 85 years on the planet and
his many years of public service, (including the first non-Ford family
member President of Ford Motor Company and President of the World
Bank), McNamara also shares some quotes that seem very, very relevant
right now. For one, “Learn from your mistakes. Try to learn. Try to
understand what happened. If people do not display wisdom, they
will clash like blind moles, and then mutual annihilation will
commence.” While talking about how close the United States came to war
during the famous “Missiles of October” crisis with Cuba and the Soviet
Union during JFK’s presidency, McNamara relates a conversation that
occurred, many years after the crisis, when he learned, in January of
1992, that there had been 162 nuclear warheads and 90 tactical warheads
on the island during the famous October, 1962, blockade of Cuba.
McNamara
asked Castro, “Did you know (the extent of the weapons on the island)?”
— to which Castro answered “Yes.” He then asked Fidel, “Would you have
recommended to (Nikita) Khrushchev, (then the Russian Premier), that he
use them?” Castro responded forcefully, that he HAD told Khrushchev to
use them! McNamara’s final question to Castro was, “What would have
happened to Cuba?” (if Khrushchev had listened to Castro’s advice and
used the weapons stockpiled on the tiny island 90 miles off the coast
of Florida). Castro admitted that the island would have been
totally destroyed. McNamara shakes his head in incredulity, seemingly
stunned to learn that this was Castro’s position. “Pull the temple down
on our heads? My God!” says McNamara.
It was
John Fitzgerald Kennedy who told the United Nations, in an address to
them on September 25, 1961, “Unconditional war can no longer lead to
unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle
disputes. It can no longer be of concern to great powers
alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by winds and waters and
fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor,
the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war
or war will put an end to mankind.” Certainly Castro’s comments to
McNamara illustrate this very danger, and the new threats of biological
and chemical weapons certainly belong in the same “to be avoided at all
costs” category as nuclear weapons, for the very reasons so eloquently
expressed by JFK at the United Nations over 43 years ago.
McNamara,
who has, for years, had a reputation more as hawk than dove, somewhat
contradicts that reputation in this documentary, saying things like,
“The human race needs to think more about killing…about conflict. Is
that what we want in the 21st century?” Various comparisons of cities
in Japan bombed during World War II (during which time McNamara served
for three years with troops flying B-29’s) are super-imposed in quick
flashes on the screen alongside the names of comparably-sized American
cities (Davenport and Des Moines, among them), revealing that Yokohama,
about the size of Cleveland, was 58% destroyed by the bombing runs in
World War II. The former Secretary of Defense talks at length about the
100,000 men, women and children who were burned to death in March of
1945 in fire bombing raids on Tokyo, noting, “I was part of a mechanism
that, in a sense, recommended it.” Ninety-nine per cent of the city of
Toyama was destroyed. Omuta, roughly the size of Miami, was 31%
destroyed.
McNamara
asks whether killing 50 to 90% of the population of 67 Japanese cities
and then dropping two nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities was
”proportionate,” noting that there is no chance to “learn” from nuclear
war…that there is “no learning power” from such an experience. He adds
that he doesn’t blame Truman for making the decision to drop nuclear
bombs to end the war, but that he and the bellicose General Curtis
LeMay (generally thought to be the model for George C. Scott’s
character in “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb”) thought that, “If we’d lost the war (WWII), we all
would have been prosecuted as war criminals. What makes it immoral if
you lose and NOT immoral if you win?”
The
lessons McNamara has to share about the Vietnam conflict seem
particularly relevant today, as he quotes Senator Scott of that era
calling Vietnam, “The war which we can neither win, nor lose, nor
drop….” One gets the feeling that McNamara found it far easier to serve
under the more intellectual and less-warlike Kennedy, who had pledged
to withdraw troops from Vietnam, than under the Texan who succeeded
him. LBJ is heard saying, in tapes made in the Oval Office, that he
wants to “whoop the hell out of ‘em….kill some of ‘em.”
This seems like very familiar terrain, indeed. “Bring it on!” revisited.
McNamara
is quoted as advising, “We need a way to get out of Vietnam and this is
a way to do it,” on October 2, 1963, when a plan was established to
remove 16,000 of the military “advisors” (as we were then calling our
American soldiers), with a plan to remove all of them within two years.
He notes that, had JFK lived, “I don’t think we’d have had 500,000 more
men there.”
Part 2 of Connie Wilson’s “The Fog of War” will appear next Monday on Blog for Iowa.
Copyright
2004 by Connie Corcoran Wilson, M.S. You may reproduce any or part of
this article, as long as you give proper attribution, and you may read
more of Connie Corcoran Wilson’s writing by ordering her book “Both
Sides Now” from the web-site www.ConnieCorcoranWilson.com.
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